Interview and Review: Alexandra Fuller Talks About Truthful Writing, Her Parents’ Past and Her Readers
Parul Kapur Hinzen interviewed Alexandra Fuller on her recent visit to Atlanta for Arts Atl. Hinzen also wrote a short review of Fuller’s latest book Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness.
They discussed Fuller’s approach to writing about race and racism and the portrayal of her mother in her books:
When I first read “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight,” Alexandra Fuller’s riveting 2001 memoir of growing up white and fiercely racist in Africa in the 1970s and ’80s, I could barely stomach some of the scenes. Such as the one in which Fuller’s pregnant mother, enraged that black-majority rule has come to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), charges madly on horseback at a group of African war refugees camping on her raggedy farm, trying to run down women and children, screaming “You fucking kaffirs!” Or the time before, when her mother and father, hopeful that Ian Smith’s white regime will squash the black freedom fighters, teach their two cute blond daughters how to fire an Uzi submachine gun at a target shaped like a cross between an African and a baboon.
Book details
- Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller
EAN: 9780857201287
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Apr
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